But this is not the whole story. The Finest Hour speech appealed to a fundamentally patriotic understanding of the war, noting with regard to the Battle of Britain that “upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire”. The “Fight Them On The Beaches” speech explicitly situated the danger from Hitler in the context of a long series of threats to British independence from Continental tyrants, and declared the Anglo-French intention to “defend to the death their native soil”.
And Britain had entered the war for old-fashioned strategic reasons; not to defeat a country with a wicked government that was oppressing its population, but to stand up to a continental power that threatened to dominate Europe and so undermine the British national interest. [...]
Something similar has been happening to the Second World War over the last few decades. Not only are the events of the war itself being repurposed to tell a simplistic tale about an idealistic war, but additionally the war is treated as an origin story for all that is considered good in the post-war world, from the NHS and the welfare state to our ability to rise above primitive notions like patriotism and national interest to the sunlit uplands of universal benevolence. [...]
There is another reason for this pivot to extreme deference to Second World War veterans, and it was neatly summed up by an astute Twitter correspondent of mine, who noted that the wartime generation have become less culturally threatening as they have aged. Discussing the recently-discovered footage of Captain Tom Moore on the TV show Blankety Blank in 1983, he suggested that at that time he was the right age (63) to be a resented authority figure, liable to tell you to get a haircut and turn that bloody racket down, rather than in the category of enormously ancient and hence admirable sage from times long past.
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